.

Search form

Academics

You are here

Annie Rogers

Professor of Psychoanalysis & Clinical Psychology

Annie Rogers, professor of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology, received her B.A. from Webster College and her Ph.D. from Washington University. She comes to Hampshire after fifteen years of teaching and doing research at Harvard University.

She has conducted studies on a range of topics including the psychological development of girls; ego and moral development in both genders; and the ways trauma and its repetition shapes development for girls. This research has been supported and funded by the Lilly Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Harvard Medical School, the Fulbright Association, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

She is the author of A Shining Affliction; Women, Girls and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance (co-edited); Charlie's Chasing the Sheep (editor); and The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma.

A watercolor painter and published poet, she lives in Ireland during the summers. Dr. Rogers is currently engaged in becoming a Lacanian psychoanalyst.

Custom Ads

Social Media Links

How does psychoanalysis understand the treatment of children and adolescents historically? How have ideas and practices of child psychotherapy within psychoanalysis changed over time? What does an analyst actually do in sessions and with what results? These are the major questions we'll address in this course. Students will engage in intensive reading of primary sources and two major papers, in addition to regularly reviewing concepts through in-class essays and role-plays. We will read classic historical cases such as Freud's Little Hans case and Melanie Klein's Narrative of a Child Analysis, and move toward contemporary accounts psychoanalysis with children. In a mid-semester paper, students will review one child case and apply a different approach to psychoanalysis to that case. In a final assignment, students will read one of four novels and create a fictional treatment relationship with a child character, then give a psychoanalytic explanation of the treatment. Students are expected to prepare for discussions (the readings are not easy), and to participate fully in class.

The course is designed as an introduction to concepts of psychoanalysis for students with no previous knowledge of Freud. We will take an historical approach, tracing the development of Freud's thought through close readings of key essays, clinical case studies, and selected literary works that inspired Freud, tracing various concepts through their evolution, abandonment, retrieval, and revision in Freud's writing from the 1890s to the 1920s and beyond. The course will start with the origins of psychoanalysis in trauma theories of hysteria, their replacement by dream analysis, theories of sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and the return of trauma in new forms in Freud's late work on the repetition-compulsion and the death drive, his theory of the uncanny and dream analysis revision. We will also read the literature that stages Freud's concerns and questions: Sophocles' Oedipus the King, and a novella by Hoffmann, The Sandman. Students are expected to write response papers to the course website, read and comment on one another's work regularly, and write two substantive papers.

In this course we will read writers who disturb experiences of memory, perception, the body and desire itself, rupturing a familiar, stable 'reality', and offering in its stead the elusive workings of the unconscious. The fiction of Proust and Woolf uniquely leaves a trace of this process of disturbance, a rich vein of language in which each maps and remaps the shifting shoreline of consciousness and desire - processes that change engagement with the world. Their work interrogates the routines and habits that disallow ambivalence and fluidity. Each explores spaces from which change can emerge, as the closure of social conventions and habits of gender become productively disturbed and critically remapped. In Lacan's work, we will explore desire as founded in radical loss and lack, the chaining of signifiers in language as key to the way the unconscious reveals itself, and creativity as a particular response to desire. Students should anticipate a challenging reading process. After engaging with the texts and responding to the art of Proust and Woolf through discussion and short papers, each student will undertake a creative project of her or his own and write about their process of creativity. Readings will include Woolf's short fiction, To the Lighthouse and The Waves; readings from Proust's The Way by Swann?s and In the shadow of Young Girls in Flower, and excerpts from The Prisoner and the Fugitive and Time Regained (using new Penguin edition translations), as well as Lacanian theories of sexuality and selections from Lacan?s crits.